Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Cannibals with Cutlery

Carolyn Brewer
was startled by the unannounced presence of an armed man in her bedroom. Her
mood didn't improve when the intruder sternly ordered her, “You don't get up.”
That directive was issued in the interest of “officer safety,” which presumably
would have been undermined if the 74-year-old woman had somehow roused
herself from her sickbed.

“I was in bed and
it was dark, and he came in and announced who he was,” Brewer recounted to me.
“He had a big spotlight and just said, `It's Fish and Game, we came here we
have to search your room.' I asked why, but he wouldn't tell me why. I told him
that I'm a widow, and I'm sick, and that I didn't want him in my room. But he
searched it anyway.”

Brewer rents a
room in the Caldwell, Idaho home of Kenneth and Carrol Watson. She was sleeping
when Lori Alley, one of the couple's adult daughters, knocked on the bedroom
door to tell her that an officer from the Idaho Department of Fish & Game
wanted to search the room. Brewer groggily replied that she wanted to be left
alone, and went back to sleep. A few minutes later, she told me, the officer
“startled me awake” by barging in despite the elderly woman's desire to be left
in peace.

The imposition
was brief, but thoroughly unpleasant. The officer went through Brewer's closet
and tried to look under her bed. While pawing through the victim's belongings
the officer knocked over a heater, an act of heedless negligence that could
easily have led to a catastrophic fire (for which he would not have been held
liable, given that he is imbued with that magic property called “qualified immunity”).

Finding nothing
of interest, he left without a word of explanation or apology, leaving a
traumatized septuagenarian in his wake.

“I was so
frightened and upset I could hardly sleep the rest of the night,” Brewer told
me a few days after the
October 8 raid. “My chest is still tight, and I can't sleep at night. There
was this man in my room with a big gun on his belt. He was very curt, and
wouldn't even tell me what he was looking for. I'm a widow, I'm sick, and I
spent the entire night in a cold room because he knocked over my heater. What made
it worse was that the owner of the house wasn't here. I felt really threatened
– I was scared, I was petrified.”

“This didn't feel
like America to me,” Brewer continued. “This was like something that would
happen in Iran, or Afghanistan, countries like that.”

Brewer is under
the care of Adult Family Services, and there was a possibility of contacting
the agency to complain about the mistreatment she had suffered. But she was
concerned that by doing so she would cause more problems for Kenneth and Carrol
Watson, for whom she has limitless respect.

“After my husband
died, I had to move out of my house,” Brewer explains. “The Watsons offered to
rent me a room. They are the nicest people – you'll never find nicer or more
generous people. They help everybody there is. If you're in need, they'll help
you.”

The Idaho Fish
& Game raid on the Watson home tested the limits of that generosity.
Kenneth, a lay pastor, and Carrol, a home-schooler, had been attending Wednesday
night church services when they received a phone call informing them about the
raid. Upon reaching their home they found five police vehicles clustered around their home, and seven officers prowling their property.

After ordering
the startled home owners to deposit their cell phones on the kitchen table –
“For our safety and your own,” they were told – Kenneth and Carrol were
presented with the warrant, which authorized the intruders to find and
confiscate "an elk, elk parts ... processed and/or packaged elk, bow and other archery equipment, images and/or video and/or digital/electronic data and associated metadata evidences in whatever form" belonging to Zack
Hershberger, another long-term guest of the family.

Instinctively
seeking to deflect blame for the imposition, Officer Paul Alexander told Mr.
Watson that Hershberger “could have avoided all this if he had just come in and
talked to us.”

Post-raid relief: Zack Hershberger is at the center. (Scott Watson)

The agency
claimed to have evidence that Hershberger, a former resident of Oregon, had
fraudulently obtained and used an Idaho elk hunting license before establishing
legal residency. When he was contacted by the agency, Hershberger – acting on
the advice of a friend who is a former trooper with the Idaho State Patrol –
refused to talk with investigators without an attorney.

This means that
the after-dark raid – which led to the invasion of a terrified old woman's
bedroom, and the in-home detention of several people for about two and a half hours on a
weeknight – was a gratuitous exercise intended to punish Hershberger, and those
with whom he lived, because of his impudent insistence on asserting his rights
under the law.

Hershberger
explained to me that he came to Caldwell in late October of last year. Over the
past year he has lived in Caldwell, Lewiston, and Nampa while working in
various jobs, both in and out of the state. With the help of Kenneth Watson and
his son-in-law, Loren Alley, Hershberger obtained both an Idaho driver's
license and a hunting
license last August.

To qualify for a resident
hunting license, the applicant
must be “domiciled in this state with the bona fide intent of making it their place
of permanent abode, for a period of not less than 6 months immediately
preceding the date of application for any license, tag, or permit.” Zack
Hershberger easily qualified under that definition.

“I was very
careful and very specific in trying to find out what Zack needed to do in order
to get his hunting license,” Loren Alley told me. “We went down to Fish &
Game and asked what he had to do in order to get a residential license, and we
were told that he had to have a driver's license, and that once this was done the burden would be on him. When we went to the DMV, we were told that the person he was living with could vouch for him. We did
exactly what Fish and Game told us to do.”

Hershberger's
difficulties began when he offered to share some elk meat with his aunt and
uncle, who appear to be of a severely authoritarian cast of mind. Rather than
thanking the young man for his generosity, they contacted the Fish & Game
department to inform them of their suspicions that he had been hunting
illegally with a fraudulent residential hunting permit.

“Fish and Game
called me yesterday [October 7] at about a quarter after five,” Hershberger
recalled to me during a conversation in the Watson family's dining room shortly
after the raid was over. “They wanted me to come down to their office at eight
the following morning. They told me that I had to come in. When I said I had
other plans – I have a job, after all – I was told `They'll have to change.'”

Unlike his
tormentors, Hershberger is honorably and gainfully employed in the productive
sector. He was also aware of the fact that the officers had no right to demand
that he speak with them without an attorney being present to advise him. He
told the officer that “I was going to work, and I told them the address where I
would be. I also said that they could send someone to talk to me, but I wasn't
going to talk with them without a lawyer.”

Shortly before
noon on the following day, an officer had materialized on the Watson family's
doorstep, demanding to know if Hershberger was at the home. Carrol Watson, whose
immeasurably more important work as a home-schooler was interrupted to deal
with the imperious pest, explained that the young man had lived with them as a
renter and expected to do so again.

“I shouldn't have
said anything to them,” she later recalled, that conclusion fortified by
outrage after she had an opportunity compare notes with Hershberger – and
realized that the officers had lied to him about her conversation with the
officer.

After the raiders
arrived later that evening, they ordered Hershberger to walk out to the
driveway where he was patted down and interrogated for about a half-hour.

“They told me
that Mrs. Watson had said I just moved in last summer,” Hershberger told me in
Mrs. Watson's presence, prompting a shocked and angry reaction from her. “The
officer said to me, `Oh, so you're saying that she lied?' He kept trying to get
me to change my answers. I didn't know at the time what Mrs. Watson had told
them, but I had no reason to change my story.”

“Yeah, I guess I
shouldn't have talked with them, either,” he concluded, regretfully.

At around 11:30
PM, after confiscating dozens of vacuum-sealed packages of elk meat, Zack's bow hunting gear, computer
drives, data cards – and deleting a photograph of an officer taken by one
of their hostages – the Fish & Game officers left.

“The officer who
interrogated me shook my hand and before he left he told me, `The door is still
open,'” Hershberger points out.

This was an
invitation for the young man to incriminate himself. None of the “evidence”
seized by the raiders could prove the charge that Hershberger obtained a
hunting license through fraud. (The only possible exception could be the "metadata" information the agency seeks to obtain from his cellphone, which might be used to track his movements during the past year.) In familiar fashion, the officers were hoping to
beguile, bully, or brow-beat him into admitting wrongdoing – or, failing that
objective, into saying something that could be fashioned into a charge of
“obstruction.”

Although Kenneth
and Carrol weren't home when the raiders showed up, their daughter, son-in-law,
and three granddaughters were in the house, along with Hershberger and Carolyn Brewer. One of the granddaughters used
her iPod to make a covert recording of the raid, which reveals the
intruders to be very well-mannered, but unbearably condescending.

Guarding the "King's" livestock: Officer Black (l.)

After the
occupants were ordered outside to be patted down “for our safety and yours,”
the officer in charge explained that “Once they get the house cleared,
everybody can go sit in the living room.... For everybody's safety we need you
all contained in there – just 'cause it's easier for us not to have to babysit
so many people. We'll put a couple of guys in there to just make sure everybody
stays safe.”

This presumptuous
fixation on “safety” prompted the demand that the captives surrender their cell
phones “because we don't want a bunch of people here.” By that time, however,
word of the raid had gotten out. One of the first to learn about the incident
was Scott Watson, Jr. (known to family and friends as Scotty), who upon his
arrival was told that he would have to leave because “they didn't want `another
person to babysit.'”

“I went to visit
my grandma, and got threatened with arrest,” Scotty Watson recalled. “My mom
called me and said Grandma's house was being raided. I went there, and the
driveway was blocked. I just drove around their vehicles and into the yard, and
starting walking into the house.”

His way was
obstructed by an officer who told him, “We have a search warrant – you're not
going beyond this point.”

“I'm going to see
my grandma,” Scotty insisted.

“I was just in
there,” the armed stranger assured Scotty. “She's smiling and happy as a clam.”

That was another
in a rather generous assortment of lies told by that individual and his
comrades that evening: Carrol Watson was polite, composed, and coldly furious.

As is so often
the case in conversation with law enforcement, the officer served a 100-proof
falsehood and chased it with a threat.

“He told me that
while my grandma was happy, one thing that wouldn't make her happy would be to
see her grandson in handcuffs,” Scott Watson. I asked to see the warrant, and
he said `no.' I asked how long I would have to wait, and he said it would be
`midnight or later.' And while I was talking to him, one of the other officers
was shining a flashlight into my car. When I told him to stop, the officer said
that I had `inserted [my] car into [his] search warrant'” – the same warrant
they refused to show him.

The uninvited
visitors maintained the pretense that they were professionals carrying out an
unpleasant by unavoidable duty.

“It's not very
fun to have all of us here,” Officer Alexander remarked at one point. “We try
to be polite and respectful about it.” Their presence was necessary, he
claimed, because “my investigators are pretty convinced that the elk [stored in a
freezer] is illegal, because Zack doesn't have a legal
license.”

It is important
to reiterate that there was no evidence to justify that conclusion, unless we
assume that a single uncorroborated allegation constitutes convincing proof.

The warrant,
which was blithely endorsed by a local magistrate, cited a “oral affidavit” by "Brian Jack, a conservation officer with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game," as justification for a nighttime
raid. That raid, as Alexander informed his hostages, could have been a fully
realized military affair, if in his judgment, “officer safety” had required it
to be.

Your correspondent at the scene of the raid.(Scott Watson)

“You're a hunting
family, we're sure there's guns and knives and all that kind of stuff in the
house,” Alexander told Carrol Watson. “Not that anybody [here] is a bad person.
We don't think that, or we'd have come in with a SWAT team and everybody else,
obviously. We don't think we're going to have any trouble, or we'd have done it
differently.”

This remark was
apparently intended to leave the Watson family and their guests prostrate with
gratitude that their domicile hadn't scored just a little higher on the “threat
matrix.” It's important to understand that a guns-drawn raid – making use of a
locally available MRAP, most likely – was considered a valid option to carry
out a raid that was staged for the sole purpose of punishing somebody who
refused to talk with officers in the absence of legal counsel.

It could be
considered progress of a sort that privileged invaders who disrupted the Watson
family's home have learned to display a measure of gentility and self-restraint
when they inflict themselves on harmless and law-abiding people. To be
specific, it is precisely the same kind of progress we would expect if
cannibals learned to use cutlery.

8 comments:

I should probably take a blood pressure tablet -- or maybe two -- before I read one of your columns, Will. The fact that this happened to good friends of yours is illustrative of how close to home the engulfing police state is today.

When cops willfully lie to citizens, they are mocking the citizen while broadcasting they are above the law. Cops whom lie to citizens are also not professionals and do not serve the citizens. They are freeloaders on government welfare who likely have never had dirt under their fingernails from doing honest work. This story is a clear case of too many freeloaders with nothing better to do than try to railroad decent people.

"After ordering the startled home owners to deposit their cell phones on the kitchen table – “For our safety and your own,” they were told – Kenneth and Carrol were presented with the warrant".

Not only does this indicate they will force you not to document what they're doing while in your home before a warrant is even presented, they even make a veiled threat that if you don't comply with giving up your ability to document their actions, you will not be safe.

Well, look at it this way. The old bat can look back on her IRS forms when she dutifully paid her taxes without question and voted every four years and console herself with having been a faithful sheep all these years. People who are unable to connect the simple dots 1+2 always = 3...and not 12 really have nothing to complain about. This is what happens when you take out the plus and equation signs. There are CONSEQUENCES. and what? I'm supposed to take the poor fool and hold their hand? Really? No sympathy at all. This has been going on for YEARS now, and poor Mrs Marple wants somebody to PLEEEEEEASE understand? Pshaw!!!